ROBERT
MacNEIL: But despite grand celebrations in London and the
colonies, there were many people in the New World who viewed
the British victory as a disaster

MARTHA
SAXTON, Historian: The consequences of the expulsion of the
French from the North American Company were truly terrible
for Native Americans. On the one hand, it gave the English
a monopoly. No consumer is in good shape when there's a monopoly
controlling the situation. There were a number of other things
that were perhaps a little bit less tangible. In many Native
American accounts of the loss of the French, what they talk
about is the French understanding of their culture, the French
desire to, to find out more about them and the French, what
I can only describe as the ability to have a good time, which
the English never really seemed to have mastered exactly.
The French also participated in cultural rituals like distributing
gifts before trade, establishing long term military alliances
that meant parity with the Indians. Again, the English never
did this kind of thing and as soon as the French were expelled
from North America, the English stopped gifts immediately
so that, so that the relationship of trade suddenly was stripped
of the ceremonial and ritual function and became really just
a market, a market transaction which the Native Americans
never really liked and didn't understand.

ROBERT
MacNEIL: Following the defeat of the French, their territory
in present-day Canada was abandoned to the British.

Courtesy
of the Hudson's Bay Company Archives

The Hudson's
Bay Company had expected to enjoy its monopoly in peace. But
its old enemy, the French were soon replaced by new competitors
-- freshly landed entrepreneurs. They were feisty Scots, adventurous
Irish hawkers and shrewd Yankee veterans of the Mississippi
fur trade. These volatile and often violent men obeyed their
own rules.

By
the late 1770's, these "peddlers," as the Bay men
called them, formed the North West Company --dedicated to
capturing control of the northern fur trade from the Hudson's
Bay Company. For the next fifty years, the competition between
the Hudson's Bay Company and the Nor'Westers would motivate
exploration and expansion of trade into the North American
interior. The partners of the North West Company met each
summer on the northwest shore of Lake Superior to plan the
next season's fur harvesting strategies. With the leadership
in the field, they were far more flexible than the Hudson's
Bay Company, whose men had to defer to their distant, London-based
management and shareholders.

Within
a few decades, the freewheeling North West Company would become
North America's first transcontinental enterprise, trading
from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from London to China.

Crewed
by French Canadian voyageurs - the famous "river rats"
- the Nor'Westers' canoes rushed freight and furs along the
great river route from Montreal to Fort William, a distance
of a thousand miles. The shallow lakes were deceptively calm
and eerily beautiful. But in a sudden squall, they could become
death traps.

Courtesy
of the National Archives of Canada

Sixty
paddle strokes a minute, 25 miles a day, seven to eight weeks
without a break, in any and all weather conditions, the voyageur
brigades were the engine of the North West Company.

Once
an hour they paused to refill their pipes. Distances came
to be measured in pipes instead of miles. Restless and ambitious,
the Nor'Westers left the Hudson's Bay Company traders far
behind in the competition for the best furs.

The
company had fallen out of step in other ways as well. It had
been almost twenty years since it had mounted a serious expedition
to explore the vast North American continent. The last trek
inland had been conducted in 1754, by a company employee,
former smuggler and net mender named Anthony Henday.

ANTHONY
HENDAY, Explorer: Almost three weeks of travel. Met four canoes
of Indians and informed me that I was on the confines of the
dry inland country, called by the natives the Muscuty Tuskee.

ROBERT
MacNEIL: During his journey, Henday would explore the western
Plains and be the first European to camp within sight of the
Rocky Mountains.

On
October 1, 1754, several months after leaving York factory,
Henday encountered leaders of the powerful Blackfoot Confederacy.

ANTHONY
HENDAY: The leader set out several grand-pipes, and we smoked
all round, according to their usual custom.

My
interpreter Attikashish informed him I was sent by the Great
Leader who lives down at the great waters, to invite his young
men down to see him and to bring with them beaver skins and
wolves skins, and they would get in return powder, shot, guns,
cloth, beads . . . The Blackfoot chief answered, it was far
off, and they could not live without buffalo flesh, and they
could not leave their horses.

He
made me a present of a handsome bow and arrows, and in return
I gave him a part of each kinds of goods I had.

Courtesy
of the Hudson's Bay Company Archives

ROBERT
MacNEIL: After traveling 900 miles, Henday's party wintered
within sight of the Rocky Mountains. In mid-January, they
began the long voyage back to York Factory.

Henday's
journey, like those of explorers before him, was largely ignored
by the company. But twenty years later, fierce competition
from the Nor'Westers began changing official attitudes.

As
it saw its trade erode, the company decided the only way to
beat the Nor'Westers was to copy them. In 1773, a company
bookkeeper, Matthew Cocking, journeyed inland in an effort
to drum up business.

Cocking
met Nor'Westers everywhere. He came back convinced that if
the company was to remain competitive, it would have to move
inland and establish permanent trading posts closer to the
Indians.

In
1774, a hundred and four years after it was founded, the Hudson's
Bay Company finally established its first inland post - Cumberland
House, on Pine Island Lake.

Within
a little more than a decade, a string of Hudson's Bay Company
posts sat along the Saskatchewan River, tiny isolated beads
on an immense necklace.

The
increased activity by the Hudson's Bay Company only made the
Nor'Westers more ambitious. They began a series of exploratory
voyages led by Alexander Mackenzie, a Scotsman. Mackenzie's
vision was to create a global British commercial empire by
linking the North American fur trade to the exotic commerce
of the Orient. His dream was reminiscent of the quest for
the Northwest Passage that had inspired explorers in earlier
centuries. In pursuit of this goal, Mackenzie set off to find
an inland route to the Pacific. His first attempt led him
to the Arctic.

Courtesy
of the Hudson's Bay Company Archives

On
July 14, 1789, the same day a mob in Paris stormed the Bastille,
Mackenzie and his small flotilla of men in canoes arrived
at the Arctic Ocean. It had taken two months of constant paddling
to make the three thousand mile journey.

Although
the voyage was a magnificent feat, it was not a trade route
to the Orient. Decades later it would become the great water
route to the Arctic, known as the Mackenzie River.

ALEXANDER
MACKENZIE: This morning I fixed a post close by our encampment
on which I engraved the latitude of the place, my own name
& the number of men with me & and the time we had
been here.

ROBERT
MacNEIL: Four years later, convinced more than ever of the
North West Company's need for a base on the Pacific coast,
Alexander Mackenzie set out again.

This
time his crew and equipment were stripped to the bare essentials:
one specially built twenty-five-foot canoe, one clerk, six
voyageurs, two Indians and a large friendly dog.

On
June 13, 1793, high in the mountains, the canoe was smashed
against the rocks. Mackenzie.

ALEXANDER
MACKENZIE: Not withstanding all our exertions, the violence
of the current was so great as to drive her sideways down
the river, and break her by the first bar. We had hardly regained
our situation, when we drove against a rock which shattered
the stern of the canoe, the violence of this stroke drove
us to the other side, in a few moments we came across a cascade
which broke several large holes in the bottom of the canoe.

ROBERT
MacNEIL: He soon left the river and set off on foot. Climbing
from cliff to cliff, from precipice to precipice, Mackenzie
and his party made their way across the mountains. When one
local guide threatened to desert, Mackenzie kept tabs on the
man by making him sleep next to him, under the same blanket.

Guided
by a relay of Indians from local tribes, he moved up into
the cool reaches of the Pacific Coastal mountain range.

Leaving
the mountains, he entered the rain forests and met the salmon-fishing
Bella Coola Indians.

ALEXANDER
MACKENZIE: From the houses I could perceive the termination
of the river, and its discharge into a narrow arm of the sea.

ROBERT
MacNEIL: Twelve years ahead of American explorers Lewis and
Clark, Mackenzie had accomplished what so many explorers had
only dreamed of - he had reached the Pacific.

ALEXANDER
MACKENZIE: I now mixed up some vermilion in melted grease,
and inscribed, in large characters, on the South-East face
of the rock on which we had slept last night, this brief memorial
- "Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty-second
of July, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three."

ROBERT
MacNEIL: They had logged an incredible 2,811 miles in territory
never before visited by Europeans. Mackenzie had not lost
a man - or a dog.

Mackenzie's
exploits have rarely been equaled. His adventures are a proud
chapter in the history of Canada. The map of North America
was forever transformed by his two voyages.

ROBERT
BOTHWELL: Mackenzie was the first person to locate the Pacific
in terms of the whole space of North America. After Mackenzie
we actually know how much there was, so Mackenzie's triumph
is first of all geographical. Second Mackenzie's triumph is
political because the British are the first to the Pacific,
and that confirms and eventually results in British Columbia
being part of the British empire instead of the empire of
Spain or Russia, or eventually the United States.

ROBERT
MacNEIL: But Mackenzie, who was a Nor'Wester, was now convinced
that the fight for the fur trade was suicidal. As competition
with the Hudson's Bay Company intensified, the Nor'Westers
kidnapped Indian trappers, laid siege to bay posts, terrorized
women and children. Dozens of bay men were murdered. The solution,
Mackenzie said, was to merge the two companies before they
destroyed one other.

His
dream of unification would indeed be realized -- although
it would take almost another thirty years. In the meantime,
the Hudson's Bay Company responded to the North West challenge
by adopting the less gentlemanly business practices of their
adversaries As the Hudson's Bay Company successfully wooed
their Indian suppliers away, the North West company fought
back by expanding their trade into new territories.

But
the North West company was unable to sustain its ever-growing
trade network, and by the early nineteenth century, the company
was near collapse. In 1820, the Nor'Westers sent a delegation
to London to negotiate a merger with their old enemy, the
Hudson's Bay Company. But the resulting agreement looked more
like a takeover than a merger. The Hudson's Bay Company had
the upper hand.

Overnight,
the territory controlled by the Hudson's Bay Company had vastly
expanded to almost three million square miles, covering most
of North America. It now stretched from the Arctic to California,
and from Labrador to Alaska.